We all want greater leads, isn’t that true? In our Email Lead Generation, we’ll reveal all deep facts and turn the way to easy-mode of researching every possible best practice for boosting those email collection numbers.
Most importantly, email lead generation consumes time, but there are approaches available for getting ahead of the curve. Let’s dig into the core concepts regarding email lead generation so you can develop your business faster.
EMAIL LEAD GENERATION
In case you’re not devoting enough resources in this email lead generation section. You’re falling money from your torn jean’s pocket. After all, smart marketers don’t prefer spending money unless they expect a fantastic ROI on that spend. Undoubtedly email lead generation is widely preferred by marketers who are in email marketing. Why? Read further to find out!
What is Lead Generation?
A lead is an individual who finds interest in an organization’s product or service in some approach, shape, or form.
Leads normally hear from a business or company after opening communication (by submitting information that is personal for an offer, subscription, or trial.) Rather than that getting a random cold call from someone who bought their contact information.
For example, in case you’re taking an online survey to learn more about the process of maintaining a car. A day or later on, you receive an email from the auto company, which created the survey regarding how they could assist you in taking care of your car. This process would highly less intrusive than if they’d just called you out of nowhere without knowledge of whether you even care about the maintenance of the car, right? That’s exactly what’s called a lead.
And from a perspective of business, the info of auto company gathers about you from your responses to the survey helps them in personalizing that opening communication to identify your existing issues without wasting any time calling leads who aren’t interested in auto services at all.
Leads are the parts of the broader life-cycle, which consumers follow when they transition from user to customer. Not every single of leads is created equally (nor are they qualified similarly). There are numerous lead types on the basis of how they are qualified & in which life-cycle stage they’re in. Now, as you’ve already now what is lead generation, let’s move further.
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Ebook on Lead Generation Best Practices
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Marketing qualified leads are basically contacts who’ve engaged with the marketing team’s efforts; however, they aren’t ready to receive a sales call. An instance of an MQL is a contact who fills out the landing page form for an offer.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Sales qualified leads are typically contacts who’ve taken actions, which expressly indicate their interest in becoming a paying customer. For example, SQL is a contact who fills out the form to ask a query about your product or service.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
PQLs are contacts who’ve utilized your product and taken actions, which indicate interest in becoming a paying customer. Product Qualified Lead normally exist for companies who provide a product trial, a free or limited version of the products they have with alternatives to upgrade, and that’s where your sales team comes in. For instance, a PQL is a shopper who uses your free version but asks or engages about features, which are only accessible upon payment.
Service Qualified Lead
Service qualified leads are the contacts and customers who’ve found your service team that they’re interested in becoming a paying customer. This qualified service lead is basically a customer who tells their representative of customer service that they’d like to enhance their product subscription, and at this time, the representative of customer service would up-level this buyer to the appropriate sales team/representative.
These lead generators are only some examples of lead generation strategies that can be used for attracting potential customers & guide them towards your offers.
Whenever somebody outside the marketing world asks you about what you do, I can’t simply say, “My work is to create content for lead generation.” It’d completely lost on them, and the individual might get really confused looks.
So rather than that, you can say, “I work on locating unique approaches to attract people to my business. I want to offer them enough goodies fro getting them naturally interested in my organization, so they eventually heat up to the brand enough and want to hear from us!”
That normally resonates better, and it’s what exactly called lead generation: It’s an approach of warming up potential shoppers to the business and making a path inside them to take action and shop.
Why do you require email marketing lead generation?
When any stranger initiates the relationship with you by letting you know an organic interest in your business, the stranger’s transition to the customer is highly natural.
Lead generation normally falls within the inbound marketing methodology’s second stage. It happens after you’ve attracted an audience and are set to convert those individuals into leads for your sales team.
Most importantly, generating leads is a crucial point in an individual’s journey to becoming a delighted customer.
Email Lead Generation Process
Now, we already understood how lead generation fits into the inbound marketing methodology; let’s walk via the steps of the process of lead generation.
- First, a visitor locates your business via one of your marketing channels, for example, your website, social media page, or from your blog.
- That visitor after that taps on your call-to-action (CTA), which can be an image, button, or message, which encourages website visitors to take action.
- That CTA takes your audience to a landing page, and that is a web page, which is designed to capture lead data in exchange for an offer.
- An offer is basically the content or something of value, which is being “offered” on a landing page, for example, an ebook, a course, or it can be a template. The offer must be having enough perceived value to the audience for them to provide their information that is personal in exchange for access to it.
- After the landing page, your visitor enters out a form in exchange for an offer. (Forms are normally hosted on landing pages. However, they can technically be embedded at any place on your website.) Congrats! You have a new lead, which will remain as long as you’re following the steps perfectly.
Identify how everything fits together!
To sum it up: Visitor taps a CTA, which takes them to a landing page where they enter out a form to get an offer, and at that point, the visitors become a lead.
You should find a lead generation tool. It assists you in creating lead capture forms directly on the website you have. Also, the setting process is very easy.
Email Lead Generation Marketing
After putting all these elements together, you can use your several promotional channels to drive traffic to the landing page to begin generating leads.
However, what channels should you use for promoting your landing page? Let’s discuss the front-end of lead generation.
Numerous channels are accessible, which can be used to get visitors to become leads. Now, let’s get deeper on lead generation marketing and discuss further:
Content
Content is an ideal approach to guide users on your landing page. Basically, you create content to offer visitors with useful, free, and knowledgeable information. You can incorporate CTAs anywhere in your content — inline, in the hero, bottom-of-post, or even on the panel’s side. The higher delighted a visitor is with your content, then he/she might click your call-to-action quickly and move onto the landing page.
An email is a great place to reach people who already have knowledge about your brand, product, or service. Asking them is much easier to take action since they’ve recently subscribed to your list. Emails might be a bit cluttered. So, utilize CTAs that have a compelling copy as well as an eye-catching design to grab the subscriber’s attention.
Also, in email marketing, you can follow the latest trends for skyrocketing your business! However, don’t forget about verifying your email list. It’s the most crucial step in email marketing!
Ads and Re-targeting
The major purpose of an ad is to get individuals to take action. Otherwise, what’s the purpose of spending money? In case you want people to convert, ensure that your landing page is perfect and offer match exactly what is you’ve promised in the ad and that the action you want visitors to take is crystal clear.
Blog
The great thing about blog posts’ usage to promote an offer is that monitoring the entire piece to the end goal will be easy. So, in case your offer is an instructional video regarding, for example, how to set Google Search Console, then writing a blog post about how to choose your marketing metrics is what you must do, which would make your CTA greatly relevant and easy to click.
Social Media
Social media platforms make guiding your followers easy to take action, from the option of swiping up on Instagram stories to Facebook’s links in bio to bitly URLs on Twitter. Promoting your offerings on your social posts as well as incorporating a call-to-action in your caption can skyrocket your business!
Product Trials
You can eliminate many barriers to a sale by offering trials of the product or service you’re selling. Once a prospect is utilizing your product, enticing them with additional offers or resources is what you can do to encourage them to purchase. Another good practice is to incorporate your branding in your free versions, so capturing other potential customers too will be possible.
Referral Marketing
No matter it’s a referral or word-of-mouth, marketing is highly useful for lead generation in the other way. That is, getting your brand in front of individuals as much as possible, which, in turn, enhances your chances of generating greater leads.
Whatever channel you’re using to generate leads, you’ll need to guide your audience to your landing page. As long as the landing page you’ve created converts. The rest will manage itself.
Why not just purchase leads?
Marketers and salespeople alike are nowadays wanting to fill their sales funnel. Also, they want to fill it rapidly. For example, the temptation of purchasing leads.
Purchasing leads, instead of organically generating them, is actually much easier and saves time & effort highly. However, be ready for being greater expensive. Some people might think we’ll already be paying to advertise anyway, so why not just purchase leads?
First and foremost, all leads you’ve shopped don’t actually know you. Normally, they’ve “opted in” at some other website when signing up for something, and might not actually opt in to receiving anything from the organization you have.
The messages you forward them are, therefore, unwanted messages, and forwarding unwanted messages is intrusive. (Don’t forget that disruptive calls are what people hate, especially when trying to eat spaghetti) That’s exactly what they think after receiving unnecessary emails and other messages from people, which they didn’t ask to hear from.
In case the prospect has never been to your site and indicated an interest in your services or products, then you’re interrupting them simply.
If they were never interested in receiving messages certainly from you, then there’s a high chance of your messages to be flagged as spam, which is quite dangerous for you. It’ll not only train to filter out emails from you, but it also locates to their email supplier which emails to filter out.
Once enough individuals flag your messages as spam, you’ll directly go on a “blacklist,” which is after that shared with other email suppliers. Once getting on the blacklist, it’s really, really hard of getting back off of it. In addition, your email deliverability, as well as IP reputation, will likely be harmed. It’s every time better to generate leads organically instead of purchasing them.
How to Qualify any Lead: Email Lead Generation
As we covered “what is lead generation” in the first section, a lead is basically a person who has shown interest in an organization’s product or service. Now, let’s talk about the approaches in which someone can actually indicate that interest.
Typically, a sales lead is generated via information generation. That information collection might come as the result of a job seeker indicating interest in a position by finishing an application. A purchaser sharing contact info in exchange for the coupon, or a person filling out the form for downloading an educational piece of content.
Gauging a Lead’s Level of Interest
Below are some approaches for which you could qualify anybody as a lead. Each of these examples indicates that the amount of gathered information used to qualify a lead and their interest’s level can differ.
Let’s assess every scenario:
- Job Application: An individual, which fills out an application form means he/she is willing to share a lot of personal information as he/she wants to be considered as a position. Filling out that application indicates their true interest in the job, because of that qualifying the individual as a lead for the organization’s recruiting team, not for marketing or sales teams.
- Coupon: Instead of the job application, you probably know just little about anybody who has stumbled one of the online coupons you have. But in case they locate the coupon valuable enough, they might be willing to offer their name & email address in exchange for it. It’s not much information. However, it is enough for a business to know that someone has an interest in the organization they have.
- Content: While the coupon’s download indicates an individual has a direct interest in the product or service you have, content (for example, an educational ebook or webinar) doesn’t. Therefore, for truly understanding the nature of the individual’s interest in your business, you might need to gather greater information to consider whether the person is interested in the product/service you have and whether they’re a good fit.
These three normal examples highlight how lead generation varies from organization-to-organization and from person to person. You’ll gather enough information to gauge whether anybody has a true, valid interest in the products and services you offer. However, how much information is considered enough may differ depending on your business.
Also, you must use web content reports for lead generation, collecting six pieces of information from prospective leads.
Following are some “what to ask” consideration in a lead gen form:
- Full Name: The most crucial information required to personalize your communication with each lead.
- Email: This serves as a rare identifier and is how you’ll contact your lead.
- Company: This will provide you the ability to research your lead’s industry and organization and how the lead might advantage you from your product or service.
- Role: Understanding the person’s role will assist you in determining how to communicate with them. Every brand stakeholder will surely have a different take & perspective on your offering.
- Country: Information regarding location can assist you in segmenting your contact by region as well as time zone and assist you in qualifying the lead relying on your service.
- State: The highly detailed information you can earn without sacrificing conversions, the better. Identifying your leads state can assist you further qualify them.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is an approach to qualify leads quantitatively. With the help of this technique, leads are assigned several values (or score) to know where they fall on the scale. For example, from “interested” to “all set for a sale.” The criteria for these actions are entirely up to you. However, it must be uniform across the marketing and sales department you have so that everyone is working on a similar scale.
A lead’s score can be identified on the basis of actions they’ve taken, the information they’ve offered, their level of engagement with the brand you’ve, or other criteria, which your sales team determines. For example, you might score someone greater in case they constantly engage with you on social media platforms. Instead, in case their demographic information perfectly matches your target audience.
Digging from the examples above, you may provide a lead a higher score in case they utilized one of your coupons — an action, which would signify this individual is interested in your product.
The greater a lead’s score, the closer they’re to become a leader that is sales-qualified (SQL), and that’s just a step away from becoming a customer. The score & criteria are something you might require to tweak along the path until you locate the formula that works. However, after doing it, you’ll transform your lead generation into the generation of the customer.
Email Lead Generation Strategies
Online lead generation encloses a huge range of campaigns, tactics, and strategies as per the requirement of the platform on which you desire to capture leads. We discussed lead capture practices once you’ve got a visitor on your website … but how can you push them there in the first spot?
Let’s get into lead generation business strategies for some of the most popular platforms.
Facebook Lead Generation
Since its inception, Facebook has been a great way for lead generation. Here, companies could insert outbound links in information in their bios and their posts as well to attract strangers to their sites and generate leads.
However, when Facebook launched Facebook Ads in 2007, and its algorithm started to favor accounts that paid for advertising, there was a huge shift in how businesses used this platform to capture leads.
Facebook made Lead Ads for this particular purpose, and it also has a special feature that permits you to put a simple call-to-action button right at your Facebook Page’s page. It’ll help you directly send Facebook followers to your website.
Twitter Lead Generation
If you use twitter, then you might be familiar with the Twitter Lead Gen Cards, which permit you to generate leads straightforwardly within a tweet without leaving the site. A user’s name, Twitter username, email address are pulled into the card automatically, and after that, they just have to click “Submit” to become a lead.
LinkedIn Lead Generation
Since its early days, LinkedIn is keen on elevating its stake in the space of advertising. Talking about lead generation, LinkedIn created Lead Gen Forms. It auto-populates with the profile data of the users when they click a CTA, and that makes it easy to capture info.
PPC Lead Generation
While talking about pay-per-click (PPC), we’re mentioning ads on search engine result pages, which you call SERPs. Google gets over 3.5 billion searches per day, and that makes it prime real estate for whatever ad campaign you say, especially lead generation. The effectiveness and success of your PPC campaign pretty much rely on seamless user flow, besides your budget, target keywords, and there are some other factors in this list.
B2B Lead Generation
B2B is a mainstream business model requiring a given approach to lead generation. HubSpot figured that SEO is the best resource if you want to capture business leads. It’s followed closely by social media and email marketing. Not to mention, effectiveness differs by channel.
Email Marketing Lead Generation Campaigns: Golden Tips
In any specific lead generation campaign, a lot of moving parts can be there. It can be challenging to tell which particular parts of your campaign are going well and which you need to fine-tune. What exactly is needed for the best-in-class lead generation? Here are a few considerable tips while building lead gen campaigns.
Tracking subscriber activity with the help of email marketing services is possible. Visit our Email Marketing Analytics Ultimate Guide, and find master tips to monitor your subscribers’ data with perfection!
Use the right lead generation services & tools for attaining desired results
As you read up there, the most successful marketing teams and individuals prefer using a formal system to store their leads. That’s where email lead generation services and lead generation tools come into play.
What’s your knowledge about the people visiting your site? Have you stored their names or their email addresses? No? Then you might at least be knowing which pages they visited, and how they’re navigating around. Further, what they do before/after filling a lead conversion form?
In case you don’t have the answers is your pockets to these questions, then you’re surely having difficulties in connecting with the audience visiting your website. These are top-notch questions you definitely should be able to answer — and using the right email lead generation services & tools. You can do it!
There are certain tools and templates available out there that’ll highly support you while creating various lead gen assets to utilize on your website:
Tips to follow
- CTA Templates: over 50 customizable call-to-action (CTA) templates are available in PowerPoint that can be used to create clickable CTA buttons and further use on your landing pages, blog, and elsewhere on your web site, free of cost!
- Visitor Tracking: Hotjar brings you the amazing heatmap tool. It’s a virtual tool that can create a color-coded representation regarding how a user navigates your website, and that helps you figure out what users need, care about, and what all they do on your site. It will record visitors and tell you where on your website did they spend the most time. By using it, you can gather info on your lead generation business forms, surveys, feedback forms, and more.
- Email lead Generation Services & Tools: Hotjar is an amazing free tool that includes lead capture beside highly appreciable contact insights features. It can scrape any pre-existing forms present on your site and further add those contacts to your current contact database. Besides that, it allows you to create pop-ups or slide-ins and hello bars— that’ll help you immediately convert website visitors into leads. It’s a lot better then any lead generation website.
- Form-Scraping Tool: It’s A form scraping tool that works with the motto of gathering submissions on your site’s existing forms and helps you automatically solidify all your generated leads into your contact database, no matter which all visitors submitted on your site.
- HubSpot clients can create and embed forms with the help of HubSpot, which populate into your CMS automatically. Non-HubSpot clients are free to use a form creation tool such as JetPack, Google Forms, or Contact Form 7. After that, use the free collected forms feature of HubSpot to capture form submissions automatically and further input them to your contact database.
Create amazing offers for various stages of the buying cycle
Not every single of your site visitor is willing to converse with your sales team or watch your product’s demo. Someone stepping the buyer’s journey might have an interest in an informational piece such as a guide or an ebook, whereas someone who’s highly familiar with your company and closes toward the bottom of the buyer’s journey might have an interest in a demo or free trial.
Ensure you’re creating offers for every single phase besides offering CTAs (call to action) for these offers throughout your website.
Yes, it consumes time to generate valuable content that teaches and brings up your leads down the funnel. However, in case you avoid offering anything to your visitors who aren’t prepared to buy, then certainly, they may never return to your site. From templates to free tools to checklists, you need to implement ideas for email lead generation content and attain success.
If you prefer to advance a step further in terms of personalization for boosting your conversion rate, you should try using smart CTAs, where they actually don’t look odd and blend well. Smart CTAs can find out where a visitor is in the buyer’s journey. Besides that, figure out he is a new visitor, a customer, or a lead, and display CTAs according to that. Personalized CTAs convert ana mazing 42% more visitors in comparison to basic calls-to-action.
Hold consistency while messaging and deliver on your promise
When we discuss highest-converting lead gen campaigns. They always deliver on what they promise besides creating a seamless transition from design and copy to the deliverable itself. Ensure that you’re providing a consistent message throughout your whole process and provide value to every individual that catches with your lead capture.
Your lead gen campaign’s aspects need to mirror everything else on your site, on your blog. Also, within your product that you are eventually trying to sell. If things aren’t like that, you’ll face a tough time pushing your lead to the higher stage. Your campaign needs to be about much more besides just obtaining an email address, and it’s the focus should be on developing a new customer and bringing satisfaction.
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Linking your CTA to your dedicated landing page is crucial
We know it seems obvious to you. However, you’d be shocked by how many marketers don’t prefer creating dedicated landing pages for their offers. Obviously, CTAs are supposed to send the website visitors to a specific landing page where you have to provide them a specific offer.
If you’re using CTAs to drive the visitors only to your homepage, then it might certainly not work out for you. Even in case, your CTA is all about your product or brand (and perhaps not a senseless offer like a download). You need to still send them to a perfectly targeted landing page that is relevant to there approach and their search. If you’ve got the chance to utilize a CTA, just send them to that page of your website, which can convert them into a lead, and that’s how you increase your lead.
Get your sales team fully involved
Do you remember when you talked about lead scoring? When did you unite your sales team member for a big target? Well, increasing leads with a good pace isn’t exactly possible without your sales team’s input and excellence. How’d you figure out what qualifies a lead for sales of your products/service without knowing in case your desired SQLs are sold successfully?
Your sales and marketing teams must be perfectly aligned upfront on the definitions, strategies, and the process of shifting a lead from MQL to SQL and further to opportunity even before you start to capture leads.
Also, be inclined towards evolving your relationship with sales besides guiding leads along your funnel. Certainly, your definitions will require refinement over time; just ensure keeping everyone involved up-to-date.
Use social media strategically and smartly
While marketers generally consider social media as the best option for top-of-the-funnel marketing. You might not know, it can still be a highly helpful and low-cost lead generation source as we shared in the lead gen strategies up there. The key is being strategical while using social media for lead generation.
Begin by adding links directly to your landing pages of high-executing offers within your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and several social media posts. Acknowledge visitors that you’re actually sending them to your landing page, and don’t play a gimmick there. That way, you’re setting expectations and meeting them.
Besides that, you can do your blog’s lead generation analysis figure out which posts are bringing you the most leads. After that, make a point of linking social media posts to them on a regular basis. Another method of generating leads from social media is running a contest. They are absolutely fun and highly engaging for your followers. Besides that, they can teach you much about your audience as well, which makes it a win-win.
Remain flexible and constantly dynamic
Your lead generation business strategy is supposed to be as dynamic as the audience you’re targeting. Trends keep on changing, behaviors keep on shifting, and opinions keep on morphing with time.
Also, the same change is needed for your lead gen marketing. Using A/B split testing is a cool method to see which CTAs perform the best, which copy captures your target audience, and which landing pages convert better. Never hesitate while experimenting with layout changes, UX, content, design, and advertising channels till the time you find what works.
Lead Generation Trends & Benchmarks
You’re getting web traffic besides generating leads, right? But how’s everything rolling on in comparison to competing companies in your industry? What’s your consideration? What should be the lead generation benchmark or you?
It’s challenging to figure out in case your lead generation business strategy is running if you aren’t analyzing industry data. That’s why we partnered with other services to survey over 950 marketers from numerous different industries in North America and Europe to make a demand generation report with perfect data on website visitors, opportunities, customers, leads, and revenue.
Did you know around 74% of organizations that weren’t exceeding revenue destinations didn’t know their visitor, MQL, lead, or sales opportunities numbers? How about that more than 70% of organizations not accomplishing their revenue destinations generate lower than 100 leads every month, and only a few of them generate over 2,500 leads every month?
Cost For Each Lead, by Industry
The media & publishing industries report the most lower cost per lead at 10 to 25 dollars. Information technology & services, Software, marketing agencies, and financial services organizations all report the maximum average cost per lead at 49 to 100 dollars.
Leads Generated Every Month, by Annual Revenue
Unsurprisingly, the greater revenue an organization has, the greater leads they generate. The differences are actually most drastic at the maximum and lowest end of the spectrum. For example, almost 77% of organizations with $250,000 or less in yearly revenue report generating lower than 100 leads every month, whereas just 11% of organizations generating $1 billion in annual revenue reports lower than 100 leads every month.
Leads per Month
We found that almost half of companies generated 500 leads for one month or fewer. Also, around 70% generated 1,000 or fewer. However, as we saw recently, the organizations having the most success rates are the actual ones generating the most leads.
The Conclusion
Almost every marketer knows the basics of email marketing. Keep creating great offers. Sending welcome emails to new subscribers, providing relevant content, and the most important, verify your email list! After that, no one can stop your organization from developing and drive tons of sales.
However, be in close touch with your sales team for ensuring you’re handing off high-quality leads constantly. Last but not least, don’t stop implementing new ideas. The more you are tweaking and test every step of your process of inbound lead generation, the more you’ll enhance lead quality & revenue.